I’m late to the party. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.
My reason for not immediately consuming Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume is twofold.1 I read a couple of negative reviews on Substack2 and, while I adore time travel, I’m not actually that fond of time loops.3 It’s a limited concept that loses its novelty once you’ve seen it performed a couple of times. I wasn’t sure I could be bothered starting a seven-book sequence about a woman living the same day again, and again, and again.4
What tipped me over the edge was my old mate Niall Harrison (whom I’ve never met in person5). He’s a superb critic—has been for two decades—and if he says a book is worth your time, you should definitely push it up the TBR pile. Niall has been quietly recommending this series of novels for two years now, and I felt it was time to at least give the first volume a crack.
And, yeah, it’s great. The hype is (mostly) justified.
As Naomi says (see footnote 1), those opening pages where our time-looped protagonist, Tara, is describing the mundanity of her daily existence—
I keep track of the days. I keep track of the sounds in the house. When it is quiet, I do nothing. I lie down and rest on the bed or I read a book, but I make no sound. Or hardly any. I breathe. I get up and tiptoe about the room. The sounds carry me around.
—are anodyne in action and devoid of emotion (AKA, boring as shit). If this is all the novel was, I would simply have stopped reading.6 The novel’s tone does gradually change in register (the subtlety is what makes it good7) and, more importantly (to me), Balle departs from the conventional time-loop arc in several key ways. I’m not going to spoil all the tweaks she makes, but the most profound is the fact that while Tara, the co-owner of an antiquarian bookstore, is trapped in the same day—18 November—she’s not (or doesn’t need to be) trapped in the same place. She resets temporally, not physically. In practice, that means she can start her day in Clarion-sous-Bois (where she lives with her husband, Thomas), end it in Bordeaux (where she travels to secure rare books for her customers), and wake the next (same) morning still in her Bordeaux hotel room. So, unlike Phil Connors from Groundhog Day, Tara isn’t forced to relive the same series of events again and again and again. She could fly to London and experience 18 November there. Tara is trapped, but her prison is the size of the planet.
Balle also cleverly subverts the more familiar elements of a time-loop narrative. We know before the chronic hysteresis8 that Tara was drifting from her husband, Thomas (apparently a shared love of old books just isn’t enough to keep a flame burning). But as Tara convinces Thomas that she’s caught in an endless loop, they rekindle that love, which makes each reset all the more tragic. Watching Tara repeatedly return to Thomas to explain what has happened, only for him to struggle to stay awake past midnight in the desperate hope of remembering, is as poignant as it is heartbreaking.
I’m not sure when I’ll be reading volume two, but whenever I do, I know I’m in for the long haul.
I don’t need a justification. You’re not my Mum. But I’m going to explain myself anyway.
Naomi Kanakia being the most notable. If I recall, she critiqued the affectless, plain, “I did this. Then I did that” prose. And, yeah, true. The narrator does spend the start of the novel listing a series of events—basically her partner moving around their house. But there’s a reason for this. If you can get through those opening pages, drained of all life, it does all come together. Wait. Shouldn’t I be saying all this in the body of the review? Ah, well. Too late. Can’t do much about it now.
My exceptions are Groundhog Day (clichéd choice, but I love it), the Next Generation episode Cause and Effect, and the enormously enjoyable Window of Opportunity, courtesy of Stargate SG-1. The golf bits crack me up.
I do this a lot. I prejudge books based on limited negative sentiment or my own prejudice towards a conceit. It’s a really bad habit, one I share with 85% of people (and bots) on the internet. I am fighting it. We all should.
Though I hope to next year…
Who am I kidding?! I would have kept going and hated every turn of the page.
Also, and I probably should have said this earlier, you’d also be exhausted, denuded of all emotions, if you’d spent more than 100 days in a time loop.
Time Lord for time loop.
Jo Walton, in her latest Reading List summary on Reactor, hates the book: "I don't know when I've loathed a book more and actually finished it...I will never read the sequels or anything else by this author... it felt like being smothered by a pillow.'
The vehemence was a bit surprising. I read it a few months back and was quite hooked. I have Vol 2 on the most immediate reading pile of books, although that's no guarantee...
always looked like an interesting read. still yet to get to it